Category Archives: Video

Maybe we should call him President BP Obama?

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The incomparable Michael Barone writes,

Looking back on all the presidential contests held since Obama as a Columbia undergraduate was parroting leftist criticisms of Ronald Reagan, it can be argued that Republicans have won the elections that turned on ideology, and that Democrats have won the elections that turned on competence.

Republican victories in 1984, 1988 and 2004 were clearly endorsements of Ronald Reagan’s and George W. Bush’s policies. Democratic victories in 1992 and 2008 were indictments of the two George Bushes for incompetence and in 1996 an endorsement of the competence of Bill Clinton.

The one election in this period that is hard to classify was in 2000 and had a split verdict, with the Democrat winning the popular vote and the Republican the Electoral College.

That makes sense, if you think about it; polls have pretty consistently shown the US to be a center-right country, closer ideologically to the Republicans (though not by a lot), but the Democrats have pretty consistently shown themselves more capable at actually running government, and particularly at doing so in a way that’s consistent with their ideology. Given that the ideological content of the President’s policies is not all that popular right now, anything that makes him and his party look less than competent is bad news—and it’s starting to look like this disaster in the Gulf could be very bad news indeed. Dick Morris wrote in The Hill,

Conservatives are so enraged at Obama’s socialism and radicalism that they are increasingly surprised to learn that he is incompetent as well. The sight of his blithering and blustering while the most massive oil spill in history moves closer to America’s beaches not only reminds one of Bush’s terrible performance during Katrina, but calls to mind Jimmy Carter’s incompetence in the face of the hostage crisis.

America is watching the president alternate between wringing his hands in helplessness and pointing his finger in blame when he should be solving the most pressing environmental problem America has faced in the past 50 years. We are watching generations of environmental protection swept away as marshes, fisheries, vacation spots, recreational beaches, wetlands, hatcheries and sanctuaries fall prey to the oil spill invasion. And, all the while, the president acts like a spectator, interrupting his basketball games only to excoriate BP for its failure to contain the spill.

Of course, Morris has been anti-Obama all the way along, so it’s not as if there was any support here for the President to lose; but how about Peggy Noonan, a certified Obamacan? From her, we got the anguished cry, “He was supposed to be competent!”

The original sin in my view is that as soon as the oil rig accident happened the president tried to maintain distance between the gusher and his presidency. He wanted people to associate the disaster with BP and not him. When your most creative thoughts in the middle of a disaster revolve around protecting your position, you are summoning trouble. When you try to dodge ownership of a problem, when you try to hide from responsibility, life will give you ownership and responsibility the hard way. . . .

I wonder if the president knows what a disaster this is not only for him but for his political assumptions. His philosophy is that it is appropriate for the federal government to occupy a more burly, significant and powerful place in America—confronting its problems of need, injustice, inequality. But in a way, and inevitably, this is always boiled down to a promise: “Trust us here in Washington, we will prove worthy of your trust.” Then the oil spill came and government could not do the job, could not meet the need, in fact seemed faraway and incapable: “We pay so much for the government and it can’t cap an undersea oil well!”

This is what happened with Katrina, and Katrina did at least two big things politically. The first was draw together everything people didn’t like about the Bush administration, everything it didn’t like about two wars and high spending and illegal immigration, and brought those strands into a heavy knot that just sat there, soggily, and came to symbolize Bushism. The second was illustrate that even though the federal government in our time has continually taken on new missions and responsibilities, the more it took on, the less it seemed capable of performing even its most essential jobs. Conservatives got this point—they know it without being told—but liberals and progressives did not. They thought Katrina was the result only of George W. Bush’s incompetence and conservatives’ failure to “believe in government.” But Mr. Obama was supposed to be competent.

Remarkable too is the way both BP and the government, 40 days in, continue to act shocked, shocked that an accident like this could have happened. If you’re drilling for oil in the deep sea, of course something terrible can happen, so you have a plan on what to do when it does.

How could there not have been a plan? How could it all be so ad hoc, so inadequate, so embarrassing? We’re plugging it now with tires, mud and golf balls? . . .

Republicans should beware, and even mute their mischief. We’re in the middle of an actual disaster. When they win back the presidency, they’ll probably get the big California earthquake. And they’ll probably blow it. Because, ironically enough, of a hard core of truth within their own philosophy: When you ask a government far away in Washington to handle everything, it will handle nothing well.

Of course, the President and other Democrats are trying to blame this one, too, on George W. Bush; but it just won’t wash. President Bush could have blamed 9/11 on Bill Clinton—if President Clinton had done his job better, al’Qaeda would never have been able to launch the attack (and Osama bin Laden might not even have been around to try). President Clinton could have spent all kinds of time at the beginning of his term blaming George H. W. Bush for the state of the economy. Ronald Reagan could have done the same with Jimmy Carter, since he inherited an economic mess that might have been worse than the one we’re in. Gerald Ford certainly would have had a great deal to blame on Richard Nixon. The list goes on. None of them did it; they took responsibility, rolled up their sleeves, and went to work solving the problems they’d been given to solve. That’s what Presidents do.

At the rate he’s going, we could expect to find Barack Obama in 2012 still campaigning against President Bush, still blaming everything bad on President Bush, as if he’d never been elected; this incessant blame game is indeed change, but not the kind of change people wanted—it’s unseemly. He needs to accept, as Noonan wrote months ago, that it’s his rubble now. That’s part of being the president, just as it’s part of being the captain of a ship: whatever happens, fair or not, it’s on you, and you need to step up and deal with it. Yeah, you get blamed for things that aren’t your fault. That’s life, it’s happened to every other president; you wanted the job, you got the job—all of it, not just the good parts. President Obama seems to be trying to only accept the good parts, and that has to stop.

To some extent, none of this should be at all surprising; at the time of his election, Barack Obama had no track record of successful executive experience to support the idea that he would in fact be a competent executive rather than just someone who talked a good game. I expected, wrongly, that we would see a major terrorist attempt on U.S. soil during his first year in office, as we had with his two immediate predecessors; I’m deeply glad to have been wrong about that, but not at all glad that the “ineffective, dithering response” I predicted to such a crisis has been the sort of response we’ve seen to the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. Indeed, it’s been worse than I thought, because as well as ineffective and dithering (even to the point of hamstringing the state of Louisiana’s efforts to protect itself), the President’s response has also been remarkably disengaged, which is something I would not have predicted.

Taken all in all, it’s enough to make one wonder—something which, as Sarah Palin noted, the media certainly would have wondered about a Republican president—if there’s any significance here to the fact that

During his time in the Senate and while running for president, Obama received a total of $77,051 from the oil giant and is the top recipient of BP PAC and individual money over the past 20 years, according to financial disclosure records.

The administration and its allies have been trying to deny, play down, and obfuscate this fact, but the records show the falsity of their denials, and the fact that other oil companies have given more to other politicians really isn’t on point: the only actors here are the Obama administration and BP, and President Obama has been America’s biggest beneficiary of BP money. Has this influenced the way the White House has treated BP in all this? Did it play a part in their decision to “keep a close watch” on BP’s efforts and otherwise let the company deal with the mess as it chose? We don’t know; we ought to. The media ought to be asking, and they aren’t. Eventually, those questions are going to have to be faced, and answered. Right now, it certainly looks as if all that BP money to Barack Obama bought a fair bit of accommodation and slack from his administration.

As a final note, I think the guy who’s come off best in this disaster is James Carville. I’ve never cared much for the man, but I have to respect his honesty and passion on this one . . . this whole story makes me sick, and I’ve never even been to Louisiana—I can only imagine his agony at what’s happening to his home state.

In uncertain times, worship

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Yesterday, William Jacobson wrote,

Decades from now, we will look back on this time period as the bad old days. I hope.

Because if these are the good old days, we are in deep trouble.

I don’t disagree with him; as is probably clear from recent posts, I have a deep feeling of foreboding about the current state of our nation and the world. At the same time, though, I am being reminded day by day that that’s only half the picture. When it seems like the world is coming apart, it’s important to remember that’s nothing new—and that as Christians, our hope is not in this world. As Ray Ortlund brilliantly says,

This life we live is not life. This life is a living death. This whole world is ruins brilliantly disguised as elegance. Christ alone is life. Christ has come, bringing his life into the wreckage called us. He has opened up, even in these ruins, the frontier of a new world where grace reigns. He is not on a mission to help us improve our lives here. He is on a mission to create a new universe, where grace reigns in life. He is that massive, that majestic, that decisive, that critical and towering and triumphant.

We don’t “apply this to our lives.” It’s too big for that. But we worship him. And we boast in the hope of living forever with him in his new death-free world of grace.

Yes, we need to care about the troubles of this world, because God is at work in and through them—including in and through us. But as Christians, we don’t begin there. We begin by remembering that we are not first and foremost people of this world, but people of the risen King; and so, properly, we begin with worship. The rest will follow, as God leads and empowers, if we keep our eyes firmly fixed on him, and our focus firmly set on following Christ.

Fly, eagle, fly

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Trying, frying, fragmented day. This is good:

Note: before the song proper starts, there’s a (sort-of-related) spoken clip and a neat instrumental bit by Mark Gersmehl.

Is the pendulum swinging against teachers’ unions? (Updated)

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Steven Brill had a remarkable piece in the New York Times a couple weeks ago on the rise of the education reformers, folks like Wendy Kopp, the founder of Teach for America; I’ve kept meaning to post on it in detail, and I just haven’t had the time to dig into it that deeply. It seems like a remarkably honest piece about the state of our educational system and the reasons for its problems, including the fact that

If unions are the Democratic Party’s base, then teachers’ unions are the base of the base. The two national teachers’ unions—the American Federation of Teachers and the larger National Education Association—together have more than 4.6 million members. That is roughly a quarter of all the union members in the country. Teachers are the best field troops in local elections. Ten percent of the delegates to the 2008 Democratic National Convention were teachers’ union members. In the last 30 years, the teachers’ unions have contributed nearly $57.4 million to federal campaigns, an amount that is about 30 percent higher than any single corporation or other union. And they have typically contributed many times more to state and local candidates. About 95 percent of it has gone to Democrats.

This, of course, creates powerful political inertia—and political inertia makes a virtue of incumbency and stifles change. There’s no question that the teachers’ unions did great things in the past, but in too many places, the pendulum has swung far too far in the other direction (as pendula will usually do).

Part of that, on my observation, is that the unions are at least as much about the good of the union leadership as they are about the good of their membership. Certainly, they stand up to governments and school districts to defend their members’ incomes and benefits; but do they stand up to parents and trial lawyers to defend their members’ freedom to teach? The greatest threat to our teachers, it seems to me, is the erosion of their authority driven by our individualistic and litigious culture, and by the spineless failure of principals and other bureaucrats to back teachers who seek to assert that authority by enforcing real discipline; where are the unions in that struggle?

Brill paints a hopeful picture, but this rests on his belief that “there is a new crop of Democratic politicians across the country . . . who seem willing to challenge the teachers’ unions.” I’m not so sure about that; we’ll see when push comes to shove, I suppose. There are certainly those who are willing to push the unions a bit and go beyond the “all we need is more money” paradigm, including President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan; but to really challenge them? Well, we’ll see if Mickey Kaus can win the California Senate primary next Tuesday.

Update: I don’t know about Democratic politicians, but there’s certainly one politician in this country who’s unequivocally willing to challenge the teachers’ unions: NJ Gov. Chris Christie.

A little music for a Sunday evening

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One of my friends on Facebook posted the chorus to “Revive Us Again” as her status, and now I have Ashley Cleveland’s version stuck in my head. Of course, it doesn’t take much to get that one stuck in my head; nor do I regret it, because it’s a great version. It’s also well worth sharing—so, without further ado:

As long as I’m at it, I’ve been meaning to post Moses Hogan’s phenomenal arrangement of “The Battle of Jericho” ever since my wife discovered it a couple weeks ago; since it’s in the same general vein, albeit a choral arrangement rather than solo voice with a blues-rock band, now’s as good a time as any.

Economics as a human system

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I have thought more than once that someone ought to try to apply systems theory to economics in a systematic way. The application of systems theory to family therapy by Murray Bowen was a huge step forward, as was Edwin Friedman‘s work in turning Bowen’s model more broadly to congregational dynamics and leadership; Rabbi Friedman’s book Generation to Generation is one every pastor should read (and periodically re-read). Systems theory helps us to understand that problems don’t exist in isolation and can’t be addressed as if they did; we all exist within interlocking relational systems, and the problems of any given individual relate to the problems of the systems of which they are a part (and indeed, may have more to do with the health of the system than with that individual).

As a consequence, systems theory teaches us that the brute-force approach to problems, the use of compulsion and coercion, is often not the best approach, because it attacks the symptom without doing anything about the underlying issue—and indeed, will likely make the underlying issue worse. Rather, it’s necessary to address problems by changing the system. To do that, you have to identify the ways in which you are supporting the system and enabling its current dysfunction, and then change your own behavior. This changes the incentive structure within the system and shifts the stress of maintaining it off of you and on to the other members; this creates a great deal of pressure on the system which will ultimately, given sufficient time, break it, thus making real progress possible.

The same is true of our economy, which is itself a system—or perhaps one might say, a meta-system, since the “individuals” which interact are corporations, which are their own complex systems—and which is, of course, embedded in the even larger meta-system of the global economy. Problems, whether they be with companies, sectors of the economy, aspects of the economy, or whatever, don’t exist in isolation, and can’t be addressed as if they did. This means that the brute force approach, the attempt to compel the behavior one desires of a given corporation or industry through legislation and regulation, is at best highly inefficient and at worst actively counterproductive. It’s like swatting at a mobile—you put the whole thing in motion, setting it turning in ways you couldn’t have predicted, leading to results you didn’t anticipate. This is why the Law of Unintended Consequences has such force.

Rather than simply trying to regulate the economy into moral behavior, we need to recognize that it’s a complex interlocking system of human relationships, and to try to address corporate and economic issues accordingly. Obviously, this is easier said than done, as the system is far too complex to be fully comprehended by the human mind, but taking this approach at least gets us closer to understanding the real issues. For instance, don’t just look at bad behavior—whether of a rebellious teenager or a company that’s cooking the books—look at the structure of incentives within the system and see what that behavior is in response to, and what’s rewarding it.

This is not a new idea in the world of economic theory; in fact, it’s quite important in the work of the Austrian school of thought, of folks like Ludwig von Mises and F. A. Hayek. It’s one of the reasons I believe they were closer to right than other economic approaches, because they understood and emphasized that the incentive structure drives economic action—that people will tend to do what they have an incentive to do, and to avoid doing what they have no incentive to do—and that when the incentives are out of whack, it will produce behavior which will be bad for the economy. One example of this is Hayek’s Nobel Prize-winning theory of the business cycle, which makes clear that if interest rates are set such as to provide an incentive for highly speculative investments, people will speculate; the result will be an economic bubble which will eventually, inevitably, burst. Just check the housing market.

To try to rationalize the economy, then, to produce steady, sustainable growth, we need to understand (as best as possible) how our laws and regulations and the decisions of government entities like the Federal Reserve and Fannie Mae create incentives for counterproductive behavior; and then we need to work to change those incentives to reward behavior that will produce long-term health rather than short-term big profits. This means not trying to fix the economy by regulating it more—indeed, it might well mean deregulating it to some degree, not because “business can be trusted” (it can’t, but neither can government), but because deregulation simplifies the system and makes it easier to see what’s actually going on.

Hayek, by the way, though an advocate of the free market, was by no means opposed to regulation; he was enough of a realist about humanity to recognize that there is a proper role for government to play in economic matters. As such, there have been those on the Right who have criticized him for not supporting the free-market system enough. From an Austrian perspective, it seems to me, the key is that the government should only regulate cautiously and with humility, out of the expectation that it knows and understands far less than it thinks it does.

Regulation to prevent clear injustice is necessary, as are efforts to insure the free flow of information, because most people will abuse the system if you give them a clear shot and a big enough reason; but regulation to try to control outcomes is almost certain to backfire. When the government tries to pick winners and losers, you end up with crony capitalism and the disasters we’re seeing now. The best we can do is to try to keep the process as fair as possible, so that everybody’s playing by the same rules; try to keep the structure of incentives as rational as possible, so that the market isn’t tilted either towards excessive risk or excessive caution; and to remember this insight from Hayek’s 1988 book The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism (quoted at the end of the rap video “Fear the Boom and Bust”):

The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.

Incidentally, the odds are pretty good that you’ve seen that rap video, produced by filmmaker John Papola and economist Russ Roberts (of George Mason University and the blog Café Hayek, which I have in the sidebar), which envisions a rap duel between Hayek and John Maynard Keynes; after all, it’s now up to nearly 1.2 million views for one version of it on YouTube alone. If not, though, unless you absolutely can’t stand rap—and maybe even then—you really ought to watch it here; it’s a great piece of work. Then go read the explication of the video (which I linked above) by one of the posters on Daily Kos (yes, seriously), and Jeffrey Tucker’s piece on the website of the Ludwig von Mises Institute. You’ll be amazed how much you can learn from a rap video. (For my own part, I’m no more a Keynesian than I ever was, but I definitely have more of an appreciation for his work now than I did.)

Going for the political jugular

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One doesn’t usually see this sort of willingness to scrap in Republican politicians. It’s a feisty and effective ad, and one which stands out from the usual run of political advertising in that it actually gives some sense of the candidate’s personality. (Pictures of candidates with family and dogs and/or doing heartwarming things don’t count; that’s just boilerplate.)

The odd thing, if I have my facts right, is that this guy is a primary challenger to a Republican incumbent—though a recent convert, Parker Griffith, who was elected in ’08 as a freshman Democrat. Interesting to see this sort of approach from someone who doesn’t even have his party’s nomination yet. It’s a good way to go, I think.

Song of the Week

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This song gets me every time.

Legacy

I don’t mind if you’ve got something nice to say about me;
I enjoy an accolade like the rest.
You could take my picture, hang it in a gallery
Of all the Who’s Whos and So-and-Sos
That used to be the best at such-and-such;
It wouldn’t matter much.

I won’t lie, it feels alright to see your name in lights;
We all need an “Atta boy” or “Atta girl.”
But in the end I’d like to hang my hat on more besides
The temporary trappings of this world

I want to leave a legacy—
How will they remember me?
Did I choose to love?
Did I point to You enough
To make a mark on things?
I want to leave an offering
A child of mercy and grace
Who blessed your name unapologetically
And leave that kind of legacy.

I don’t have to look too far or too long a while
To make a lengthly list of all that I enjoy;
It’s an accumulating trinket and a treasure pile,
Where moth and rust, thieves and such
Will soon enough destroy.

Chorus

Not well traveled, not well read;
Not well-to-do, or well-bred;
Just want to hear instead,
“Well done, good and faithful one.”

Chorus

Words and music: Nichole Nordeman
© 2002 Ariose Music
From the album Woven & Spun, by Nichole Nordeman